Abstract

In the preceding paper Sir Ernst Chain described how the discovery of 6-APA and its subsequent conversion into a succession of therapeutically important semisynthetic penicillins has created a new international antibiotics industry. As the key raw material for this industry 6-APA has been transformed within the last decade, from a scientific curiosity into a fairly commonplace raw material which can now be produced in tonnage quantities; progress has been achieved by developing both microbial and chemical processes to this important compound (figure 1), and I would like to discuss the scientific background from which modern technologies have been evolved to provide this material.

Footnotes

This text was harvested from a scanned image of the original document using optical character recognition (OCR) software. As such, it may contain errors. Please contact the Royal Society if you find an error you would like to see corrected. Mathematical notations produced through Infty OCR.